California Gov. Jerry Brown at the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento, Dec. 5, 2017. After 45 years in politics, Brown, whose second term ends in 2019, has entered what he said are his final months of being on the public stage. (Max Whittaker/The New York Times)

“I’m not here to make news,” Gov. Jerry Brown joked the other day in a valedictory sit-down onstage interview at the Sacramento Press Club. “I’m here to enlighten you.”

I mean, you know, I think he was joking. I was just listening to a KCRW clip of what was billed as “The Exit Interview,” not sitting beside him as were Brown tea-leaf readers journalists Miriam Pawel and George Skelton. Pawel has written a big biography of the entire Brown clan and Skelton has covered the former boy governor for over 50 years. I’ve just met him a few times down the decades in editorial board meetings.

Still, I think I could detect the twinkle in Brown’s eye even through a radio speaker.

A twinkle even though as usual Brown was addressing a serious topic — the death penalty. The way he was choosing to answer stands as a kind of metaphor for the way he has always been with the press. If you’re a critic, you might call it being slippery, evasive. A fan of one of the least-boring American politicians ever would instead call it instead being unique.

Yes, as a former Jesuit seminarian, our four-term capo dei capi has long expressed a moral objection to capital punishment. But still he toyed with these journalists who were asking him whether he would try to pardon everyone on California’s death row before abandoning the governor’s bully pulpit for the last time next month. He wasn’t going to break that news on their stage. He’d do it in his own sweet time. And he’d decline to answer their question in a joke that played on both his mystic Catholicism and penchant for Zen Buddhism as well.

Is personality a real as opposed to bright-shiny-object aspect of politics? Of course it is. Otherwise we could just have a governor email in his edicts on issues. Where’s the fun, where’s the nuance in that?

I was so mad once at a former boss who put the kibosh on levity at the beginning of an editorial board meeting we were having with Brown.

The governor was asked whether he would like coffee, or perhaps tea, and, looking at the offerings, he declined. Sitting closest to his end of the table, I leaned in and started to mock-apologize for our failure to have in the newsroom a wooden whisk for his favorite matcha green tea powder, which I’d heard was a morning Zen ritual for Brown. Just as I asked “Do you still do that, governor?,” just as I sought the chance for an insightful anecdote rather than a rote reply about tax policy, I was shut down.

How interesting as opposed to rote Brown has made his role in California’s politics over such a long time. I was a college sophomore rock critic when he was first elected governor in 1974 — longhaired, oddball, seemingly surprised as the rest of us that he’d won. He confounded everyone by being no one’s idea of a politician. He drove the Plymouth, not the Caddy. He lived in his own cheap Sacramento apartment, not the Victorian mansion or the Reagans’ Buff & Hensman modernist spread by the river. He paddled left, he paddled right — he showed that you can make a politics of your own by approaching each issue individually and making a call based on the facts, not the received pedantry.

He fought for the environment and then in the absence of a national leader he became America’s emissary to the world in the age of climate change.

My favorite Jerry Brown story is from when he was mayor of Oakland in the years separating his governorships. At the presser to announce a redevelopment housing project in the formerly dilapidated downtown, he was asked how many of the units would be mandated “affordable.”

“None of them,” said Brown. “Oakland has enough poor people already.”

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.

Larry Wilson is public editor of the San Gabriel Valley Newspapers and a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Southern California News Group. He was hired as editorial page editor of the Pasadena Star-News in 1987, and then for 12 years was that paper's editor. He now writes editorials for SCNG, a local column in the Star-News on Wednesdays and a regional column for the group on Sundays.